Elliott Hester - Plane Insanity: A Flight Attendants Tales of Sex, Rage, and Queasiness at 30,000 Feet

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Table of Contents

Bad trips are wonderful as long as they happen to other people.
We all love travel misadventure stories, partly because they make
us laugh, but mainly because they could have happened to us
and didntat least not this time around.

Douglas McArthur The Globe and Mail, Toronto

I never wanted to be a flight attendant.

I never fantasized about slinging chicken and beef at thirty thousand feet. Never dreamed of wearing a polyester-wool uniform, working fourteen-hour days, being cussed at by business flyers, puked on by kids, swung on by air ragers, poked by the elderly and subjected to the rueful drone of pilots reminiscing about simpler days when they flew C-130 military cargo planes and had yet to sign an alimony check. I never aspired to any of this. At least not until freezing my ass off in the winter of85.

That January, during one of the nastiest subzero streaks in Chicagos history, I worked outside as a part-time baggage handler for a second-rate airline at the worlds busiest airport. Relegated to the graveyard shift, Id show up at the OHare ramp dressed in layered clothing suitable for the Alaskan Iditarod: long underwear, polypropylene sweats, extra-thick wool army fatigues, a turtleneck pullover, heavy sweater, three-quarter-length parka, insulated work boots, insulated gloves, an insulated jock strap and a wool skull cap. When the temperature really plummeted, I put on a ski mask and goggles.

For a moment, try to imagine me on the airport tarmac, dressed in the aforementioned igloo wear and standing beneath the belly of a Boeing 727. Imagine a night when the windchill factor knocks the temperature down to 64 degrees below zero. Imagine crystals of my own frozen breath, clinging around the mouth hole of my ski mask as I turn to the luggage cart, bend forward, lift a forty-pound piece of passenger luggage and toss it onto a belt loader that angles up to the 727s cargo compartment. Imagine a gust of ice-cold wind rushing up my pant leg, past the insulated jockstrapinstantly reducing my testicles to the size of cocktail peanuts. Imagine my aching back, after Ive lifted and tossed the 527th passenger bag of the night. Now try to imagine the condition of your Samsonite, my 528th, once Ive snatched it from the baggage cart, raised it above my head and slammed it onto the belt loader in an act of primal fury.

On one such nightas arctic winds roared up my pant leg, as yet another piece of luggage flew from my frostbitten fingersI looked up, squinted through my ski goggles and gazed upon a flight attendant through an airplane window. She was sitting in a passenger seat, sipping something warm and steamy from a Styrofoam cup. Waiting, no doubt, for the throng of passengers with whom she would soon fly away to Mexico City. She looked down at me and waved. It was a short, sad wave. The kind of wave offered by an inmates wife, when visiting hours have ended at Rikers Island.

Perhaps it was the late hour (1 A.M.), or the muscle fatigue (everythingincluding my glutesached), or the fact that hypothermia was about to set inwhatever the reason, I stood there, shivering, mesmerized by the look of pity on her face. A look that, in turn, made me feel sorry for myself. Thats when the cold, hard hand of common sense reached out and slapped me in the face.

Why the hell was I slaving on the frozen airport tundra with a bunch of guys like Vic and T-Bone, when I could be working inside the airplane with long-legged coworkers named Audrey and Monica and Priscilla Jean? Why was I still living in Chicago, the Siberia of the Midwest, when I could be based in Miami or Los Angeles? There was nothing to keep me here in the Cold and Windy City. No wife. No illegitimate kids. No mortgage payments. I suddenly realized that this was my chance to get out of town before I found myself stuck in an OHare-area suburb, buried beneath a familial snow drift from which I could never dig out.

A few months after this bone-chilling epiphany I found myself at the headquarters of a major U.S. airline, immersed in a five-week flight-attendant training program.

Simply put, training was five weeks of hell. Five weeks of sharing a dormitory room with four male traineesone snored like a drunken cartoon character, another argued with his mother in his sleep. Five weeks of listening to Stalinist lectures about the common good of the company and the importance of teamwork. Five weeks of practicing airplane evacuation procedures, of contemplating the great complexities of in-flight food service, of performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on truncated mannequins, of worrying about being kicked out for one of a variety of indiscretions. (One of my roommates crashed and burned for laughing too loud in the hallway.) It was five long weeks of sympathizing with more than fifty women who were forced to wear prodigious amounts of makeup. Lipstick should be bright enough to be seen from across a large room. This lipstick mandateheld as near to the hearts of airline grooming instructors as the Second Amendment to NRA devoteesleft some women feeling like circus clowns.

I cant wait till the day I get off probation, I heard one of them say. This crap is coming right off.

Jasmine, one of only a handful of African-American trainees, was forced to dye her red hair black. The grooming coordinator, an alleged style expert who hailed from the trend-setting metropolis of Waxahachie, Texas, apparently believed that a black woman with natural red hair was a walking fashion faux pas. Even if this particular black woman had the freckles to match.

The grooming coordinator managed to spread her ignorance beyond racial boundaries as well. Compelled to have her white locks homogenized to a more appropriate shade, Cynthia, a platinum blonde from Los Angeles, found herself at the mercy of an inexperienced airline stylist. After a screw-up in chemical application, the green-haired Californian was last seen running from the training center in tears.

Because hair and makeup issues rarely concern men, I managed to escape the scrutiny of the backwoods grooming Gestapo. Nevertheless, I learned to buff my fingernails to a luster that would make Richard Simmons proud. Although I failed one or two exams, screwed up the meal service during simulated flight, and got caught kissing a horny coed (her redneck townie boyfriend would have shot us both had he known what happened the following night), I matriculated from the Charm Farm and was shipped off to New York.

Thats where I began earning my stripes as an in-flight bartender/referee/therapist.

Human behavior is rarely more incomprehensible than when witnessed on an airplane at thirty thousand feet. Passengers have been known to freak out or act up for a variety of reasons: turbulence, fear of flying, too much alcohol, not enough sense, or because theyre stuck for hours in a crowded metal tube equipped with smelly lavatories, lousy food and seats best suited for Danny Devito and family. These conditions can turn even the most sophisticated travelers into airborne newborns that flight attendants, despite our best efforts, have difficulty trying to appease.

In sixteen years of flight service, Ive flown to nearly one hundred destinations in twenty-three countries and seen more than my share of in-flight theatrics. I once saw a drunken couple puke on each other until they looked as if theyd emerged from a pool of oatmeal. I watched a smug-faced man receiving high-altitude fellatio from a woman hed just met on the flight. I witnessed a daring heist in which five hundred thousand dollars was stolen from a 727. Ive seen fullblown airplane brawls, passenger stampedes, a flight attendant in the midst of a nervous breakdown, passengers in various stages of undress, and stressed-out flyers attempting to open the emergency exit six miles above the Atlantic.

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